Therefore, this structure was just a haunted house. Our best hope of
finding our way through its many rooms and back to the safer side of the
spook zone was to remember that ghosts can’t hurt you unless you
yourself give them the power to harm you, unless you feed their
substance with your fear. This is the classic theory, well known to
spirit channelers and ghost busters all over the world. I think I read
it in a comic book.
The three ghosts were just fifty feet from the turn that would finally
take them out of sight, around one arc of the long racetrack corridor.
They stopped. Stood with their heads together. Talking above the
throbbing noise that flooded the building.
The specter in the jeans and white shirt turned to a door and opened it.
Then the other two wraithsthe one in the suit, the one in the khakis and
lab coat continued toward the end of the hall.
As he opened the door, the first spook must have registered us in his
peripheral vision. He swung toward us, as though he had seen ghosts.
He took a couple steps in our direction but then halted, maybe because
he noticed our guns.
He shouted. His words weren’t clear, but he wasn’t suggesting a tour and
complimentary lunch in the cafeteria.
Anyway, he wasn’t calling to us but to the pair of phantasms strolling
toward the turn in the corridor. They spun around and gaped at us as
though they were stunned sailors gazing at the ghost ship Marie Celeste
gliding silently past in a light fog.
We had spooked them as much as they had spooked us.
The one in the suit evidently wasn’t merely a well-tailored scientist or
a project bureaucrat, and certainly not a Jehovah’s Witness pushing
Watchtower magazine in a tough territory, because he drew a handgun from
a holster under his jacket.
I reminded myself that ghosts couldn’t hurt us unless we gave them power
by feeding them with our fear and then I wondered if this rule applied to
haunts packing heat. I wished that I could remember the name of the
comic book in which I’d chanced upon this wisdom, because if the
information had been in Tales from the Crypt, it might be true, but if
it was from an issue of Donald Duck adventures, then I was screwed.
Instead of opening fire on us, the armed apparition pushed past his two
phantom friends and disappeared through the door that the one in jeans
had opened.
He was probably running for a telephone, to call security. We were about
to be crunched, swept up, bagged, and put out for garbage collection.
Around us, the corridor rippled, and things changed.
The white ceramic floor tiles quickly faded beneath us, leaving us
standing on bare concrete, although I felt nothing move underfoot.
Here and there along the hall, patches of tile remained, the edges not
sharply defined, feathering into the concrete, as though these were
widely scattered puddles of time past that hadn’t yet evaporated from
the floor of time present.
The rooms opening along the inner wall of the corridor no longer had
doors.
Shadows swarmed as the fluorescent panels began to disappear from the
ceiling. Yet, in an irregular pattern, a few fixtures remained,
brightening widely separated sections of the corridor.
I took off my sunglasses and pocketed them as the grease-pencil
scheduling chart dissolved from the wall. The bulletin board still hung
unchanged.
One of the wheeled carts faded away before my eyes. The other cart
remained, though a few of the odd instruments racked on it were becoming
transparent.
The ghost in blue jeans and the ghost in a lab coat really looked like
spirits now, mere ectoplasmic entities that had congealed out of a white
mist. They started hesitantly toward us, then began to run, perhaps
because we were fading from their view just as they were disappearing
from ours. They covered only half the ground between us before they
vanished.
The suit with the gun returned to the hallway from the office, having
raved to security about Vikings in jumpsuits and invading cats, but he
was now the weakest of revenants, a shimmering wraith. As he raised his